Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Part 8’s title, “Ghost,” refers to the unacknowledged writer on the train, Jasper, and his position as a ghostwriter. For readers, who exist outside the novel, it also alludes to Stevenson’s conceit that he himself isn’t the author of his own book—Ernie is—and to Ernie’s belief that readers are a kind of coauthor, or ghostwriter, of the story. It’s also a sly reference to the novel’s end, when Harriet seemingly comes back from the dead to seek revenge against Ernie. Taken together, “Ghost,” “Co-Writer,” and Juliette’s Epilogue bring both the novel and its arguments regarding language, genre, and authorial culture to a conclusion.

Throughout the story, Stevenson has used Ernie’s story to build a thematic argument about Language as a Tool to Manipulate Perception. The book’s final sections are the culmination of this argument. The ultimate example of how language can be used to mislead is Harriet’s ability to tell the absolute truth to Ernie while still obscuring her husband’s role as McTavish’s ghostwriter and her own role as a double murderer. In Chapter 35, Ernie deconstructs each of her statements, showing how artfully she used true statements to create false impressions. Later, in his email to his publishing house, Ernie explains how he played a similar trick throughout Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect: For instance, he was truthful in his statements that seven writers would board the train but only five would exit in Adelaide and that two cases often turn out to be related; he simply relied on readers’ misapprehensions about who, exactly, counts as a writer and which two cases he was talking about.

In addition, the novel’s final sections cap off the novel’s thematic arguments regarding Genre and Its Impact on Creativity. When Ernie explains the solution to Jasper’s “Archie Bench” puzzle, he reveals that it’s an allusion to Sherlock Holmes’s feigned death. This allusion, within the fictional world of the novel, is meant to reassure Wyatt that Jasper intends to bring Morbund back to life just as Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back to life. In a larger context, however, it’s part of a motif of feigned deaths that begins with McTavish’s third novel (in which the killer fakes his own death), continues through to the explanation of the Archie Bench mystery, and culminates in Harriet’s resurrection during the Epilogue. With Harriet’s reappearance, the section title “Ghost” becomes a humorous, metafictional internal allusion that points out something important about genre: A common mystery trope can repeat over and over within the same novel and still surprise readers. Even when haunted by the “ghost” of a mystery cliché, a story can still be engaging and fresh. Echoing this idea is Juliette’s meditation on sequels during the Epilogue. Although some sequels can be disappointing, like McTavish’s, when an author grows and evolves in between outings—as Ernie has—a sequel can improve over its predecessor. The repetitions of the trope become a source of strength, “[a] chance to fix up the mistakes you made the first time around” (312).

In its final sections, the book argues that the interactive nature of fiction can strengthen genre conventions and sequels. In his email, Ernie describes his own journey from a more egocentric understanding of writing, typical of the book’s thematic depiction of The Foibles of Literary Culture and Authorial Ego, to a more outwardly focused understanding of writing. For much of the book, Ernie has been chasing a kind of legacy that involves making his mark on the world through his own perspective and attaching his name to a narrative. Now, he understands that readers are a key part of a book’s meaning. His own devotion to the rules of genre and his own creative interpretations of these rules are only part of the story; readers provide the other part through creative interpretations of their own. Ernie’s willingness to turn the book over to a new point of view when he asks Juliette to finish the story indicates a genuine change of heart: He now sees both life and writing as a cooperative endeavor. Juliette is the “Co-Writer” of Ernie’s story—both his life story and his novel, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect. Juliette adds the book’s significant final line. On the surface, when she notes, “Ernest finally told me whose story this is: ours” (312), she’s making a claim for herself as the coauthor of the life story she and Ernie are building together. However, her syntax here ends the book on the word “ours.” Given the frequent use of second-person narration that Ernie uses throughout the text to directly address readers, one can read this word as inclusive: Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is the co-production of Stevenson, his fictional characters Ernie and Juliette, and the readers themselves.